[2] Design for the river front of the bridge, 1770

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Public buildings
  - Pulteney Bridge, Bath, Somerset: executed scheme commissioned by William Pulteney, 1770 (6)
    - Designs and finished drawings for the bridge, 1770, as executed (6)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 38/2

Purpose

[2] Design for the river front of the bridge, 1770

Aspect

Elevation of a bridge composed of three equal segmental arches, supported by stepped starlings and pyramid-topped piers, above which are oculi and rectangular windows. On top of the bridge is a single and one-and-a-half-storey, nineteen-bay terrace; with single-bay domed and pedimented pavilions at each end; and with a three-bay central block surmounted by a broken-based pediment, containing a Venetian window within a relieving arch, and flanked by balustraded bays, and bays surmounted by attics with pyramidal roofs

Scale

bar scale of 1 1/3 inches to 10 feet

Inscribed

Front of the New Bridge & Shops at Bath, for / Sir William Pulteney Bart (for / Sir William Pulteney Bart in the hand of William Adam) / for Wm Pulteney Esqr afterwards (in pencil) / Sir William Pulteney Baronet (in pencil) / Highest flood / Common hight / Lowest part of River and measurements given

Signed and dated

1770
datable to 1770

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and coloured washes of sepia and cerulean blue on laid paper (597 x 502)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly William Hamilton or Joseph Bonom, with addition to title inscription in the hand of William Adam

Watermark

JWHATMAN

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 3
Manco, 1995, p. 135
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).